The headline above violates just about every rule of political correctness. And as a reader, you should know that the mayor of London totally opposes its sentiment: He is, after all, one of the primary forces behind the proposal that a 17-acre mosque—the largest outside of the Middle East—be built for 70,000 Muslims in London. His intention is to provide an Islamic quarter for the 2012 Olympic Games—one that will hold only 10,000 fewer people than the Olympic stadium itself.

Consider the mayor’s view carefully because no one has shown more understanding of the Islamic cause than he: Mayor Ken Livingstone has publicly embraced the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who openly supports suicide bombings in Iraq. Once a supporter of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, the mayor now backs the Palestinian cause and has identified Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. Livingstone has expressed his concern with calling Muslim suicide bombers terrorists: “If a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate,” he said. “But for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think, I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist.” As he pointed out, the Islamists “only have their bodies to use as weapons.” That, and whatever explosives are strapped to them.

Perhaps the mayor of London is not the best backer for this project after all. Instead, look to the mega-mosque’s Muslim backers: an Islamic missionary group called Tablighi Jamaat. The fbi identifies it as a recruiting ground for al Qaeda. Two of the bombers on 7/7 were associated with Tablighi Jamaat, as was shoe bomber Richard Reid. Counterintelligence officer Alex Alexiev calls Tablighi Jamaat “the first step on the road to extremism.” Is allowing a terrorist-backing organization to build a fortress in London intended for use during the Olympic games such a super idea?

Put another way: What are the British thinking? The signs that radical Islam is out of control in Britain are not subtle. In a poll last year, nearly a quarter of Muslims living in Britain said they felt the 7/7 train bombings were justified. The estimated Muslim population in Britain is 1.6 million people (not accounting for a widespread illegal immigration problem), which means there are nearly 400,000 Muslims living in Britain with sympathies toward those who indiscriminately set off bombs. If only a quarter of one percent of those people would be willing to set one off themselves, there would still be one thousand explosions in Britain.

A major mosque in London sells advd that prophesies “mass extermination of Jews around the world on a ‘day of judgment’ and attacks Christian groups,” according to Arutz Sheva’s Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu. London has become an epicenter for radicalized anti-West thinking.

What Mayor Livingstone is offering is a symbol—a symbol that Islamist thinking has taken permanent root in British culture. This isn’t the same as setting off a bomb in the subway, but the same groups that recognize the effectiveness of terror recognize the value that a 17-acre symbol of Islamism will have in London.

On Dec. 26, 2006, Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes warned that the West could lose the culture war with Islam, saying, “Should Islamists get smart and avoid mass destruction, but instead stick to the lawful, political, non-violent route, and should their movement remain vital, it is difficult to see what will stop them.” The West is barely able to maintain its determination to oppose active terrorism. How much effort will Britain exert to stop a rising symbol?

Pipes warned that pacifism, self-hatred and complacency are potentially fatal problems in the West. The conviction that “there is no military solution” is applied to every Middle East problem; self-hatred leads America and Britain to believe that terrorism is a just response to the evil of our governments; the lack of an organized military force among the Islamists breeds complacency.

This situation epitomizes the problem with Britain’s reaction to the culture war with Islamists. If the Church of England tried to build a cathedral, even one the size of a snow-cone stand, in Saudi Arabia, it would quickly discover how one-sided this complacency is. There are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia; in stark contrast, there are 300 mosques and 500 madrassahs in London alone. Any notion that Islamism should be actively opposed on British soil is being hamstrung.

It all goes back to political correctness, an entrenched belief that whatever the minority does is justified by virtue of its having been oppressed by the majority—even if the minority’s goal is to live in Britain’s borders but not under its laws and, ultimately, to wipe out the British majority’s way of life.

In the November-December 2006 issue of the Philadelphia Trumpet, Britain’s reaction to Islam was identified as a sickness, a homegrown infection that was prophesied over 2,700 years ago. For more information on the cause of that illness and where this situation is headed, please read “The Sickness in Britain‘s Heart.”